Introduction to the UMLS

Since 1986 the National Library of Medicine has begun a long term research project to build the Unified Medical Language System. The purpose of the UMLS is to improve the capability of the system to realize user's biomedical queries and further help retrieve and integrate relevant information. To achieve the goals of the UMLS project, NLM designed four knowledge sources: Metathesaurus, Semantic Network, Information Source Map, and Specialist Lexicon. In this paper, we introduce the development assumption and strategy of the UMLS and the implementation of the four knowledge sources. We also try to analyze the possibilities of applying the four knowledge sources of the UMLS to the present information environment in Taiwan. We hope that this paper is just a beginning for us, so-called information managers, to think about how to build a powerful Chinese database.[Article content in Chinese]